https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/09/11/can-we-talk-to-whales
"David Gruber began his almost impossibly varied career studying bluestriped
grunt fish off the coast of Belize. He was an undergraduate, and his job was to
track the fish at night. He navigated by the stars and slept in a tent on the
beach. “It was a dream,” he recalled recently. “I didn’t know what I was doing,
but I was performing what I thought a marine biologist would do.”
Gruber went on to work in Guyana, mapping forest plots, and in Florida,
calculating how much water it would take to restore the Everglades. He wrote a
Ph.D. thesis on carbon cycling in the oceans and became a professor of biology
at the City University of New York. Along the way, he got interested in green
fluorescent proteins, which are naturally synthesized by jellyfish but, with a
little gene editing, can be produced by almost any living thing, including
humans.
While working in the Solomon Islands, northeast of Australia, Gruber discovered
dozens of species of fluorescent fish, including a fluorescent shark, which
opened up new questions. What would a fluorescent shark look like to another
fluorescent shark? Gruber enlisted researchers in optics to help him construct
a special “shark’s eye” camera. (Sharks see only in blue and green;
fluorescence, it turns out, shows up to them as greater contrast.) Meanwhile,
he was also studying creatures known as comb jellies at the Mystic Aquarium, in
Connecticut, trying to determine how, exactly, they manufacture the molecules
that make them glow. This led him to wonder about the way that jellyfish
experience the world. Gruber enlisted another set of collaborators to develop
robots that could handle jellyfish with jellyfish-like delicacy.
“I wanted to know: Is there a way where robots and people can be brought
together that builds empathy?” he told me."
Via
Future Crunch:
<
https://futurecrunch.com/good-news-abortion-mexico-vaccine-indonesia-conservation-alaska/>
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
